


Hitting Turbulence

by buhdderkupp



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Coping, Gen, Nightmares, Past Abuse, Past Violence, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 01:38:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13043826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buhdderkupp/pseuds/buhdderkupp
Summary: Five times Ward handles nightmares alone and one time he gets help





	Hitting Turbulence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [This](https://archiveofourown.org/users/This/gifts).



> Thank you to M and K for their help reading this over and dealing with how much I worried. Any errors that remain are definitely all on me. 
> 
> This, I hope you enjoy your gift. Ward really does have the best character arc in Iron Fist, and I enjoyed being able to explore him more.

_ A nightmare is only a dream that hits turbulence. ~Terri Guillemets _

1\. _*Twack* *Twack* *Twack* He can feel the blood as it ricochets when the hammer hits the face of the Hand goon - he thinks Harold said one of their names was Vando, maybe it’s this one? He hasn’t gotten quite as far on the other goon yet._

_ He pushes down vomit rising in his throat as he continues swinging the hammer. “That’s it, Ward,” encourages Harold. “Have to make sure they’re not identifiable when they eventually get found after you dump them in the park. Keep going.”  _

_ Ward raises the hammer again, trying to pretend he’s doing anything but this. _

He wakes with a start, and immediately the image of the dead body he had to dump for Harold comes to mind - somehow even though he knows he didn’t take the hammer to the bodies, he feels their blood on his face, on his arms. He stumbles to the bathroom off the suite and just manages to make it to the toilet before the vomit starts. He’s choking on it, crying, all the while remembering how the dream made him feel like he was the one mutilating the bodies. Eventually there's nothing left to come up.

Ward slowly backs away from the toilet, to sit back against the wall, without even the energy to get up to rinse the bitter acid taste out of his mouth. He thinks he may have been able to if he still had pills to take - god, how he wants his pills to help him forget about this tonight and let him be numb for a bit. 

He sits there for what feels like hours, but is probably only about thirty minutes before he’s able to get himself up and to the shower. All the scrubbing he does eventually makes him feel clean from the vomit, but he still feels traces of the blood that was never really there. 

 

2\. _“You’re an ungrateful bastard, Ward,” Harold tells him as he takes the belt to Ward again. “Everything has been set up in your life for you to succeed, and yet you somehow continue to fuck everything up You all but had the answers for this exam handed to you. And yet, instead of preparing for it, you end up drunk at a party playing high stakes poker.”_

_ Ward feels the belt strike his back and flinches. “You’ll never succeed. I’ll never be able to let you run Rand, you’ll run it straight into the ground. I should just give up on any hope of your ability to live up to my reputation and all the work I did. You’re a failure at everything you do.”  _

Ward awakes to find himself hunched over his desk, the financial reports he was reviewing still on his desk, awaiting final markups. He reaches his arms up to stretch out his cramped upper body, and spares a thought to the memory of earning a C on that Impact Investing exam, and the pain he felt after another beating by his dad for another perceived failure on his part.  Then he grabs his pens and the reports, and finishes his review of the documents showing another year of profit for Rand Enterprises. Harold may have thought of him as a failure, but now that he’s out of Harold’s influence, he’s showing the world he can be successful on his own terms.

 

3\. _The leather chair Ward is slouching on feels harder than usual, but Ward isn’t sure if that’s his imagination running rampant while he’s on edge trying to figure out how the agreement he made with Bakuto went wrong. He should have been out of here with Joy already, leaving Bakuto to handle making sure Harold was never able to return. Instead, Bakuto is forcing him and Joy to watch Harold die for the third time, while he facetimes Danny for some reason known only to himself. This isn’t the way Ward wanted this to play out - Joy was supposed to be protected from the trauma of seeing Dad killed again. She wasn't supposed to find out Ward basically delivered Harold to Bakuto on a platter._

_ “You should take this as a compliment. It shows how much you mean to me,” Bakuto tells Danny over the video. Ward thinks this must be the moment when Harold will be beheaded. Instead, in slow motion, he sees Bakuto raise his gun, point it at Joy, and shoots Joy in the head. Without even realizing he’s doing anything, he’s on his feet and moving towards her, his heart already sunk as he takes in the blood coming out of her head, and the pieces of skull he can see.  _

Ward wakes just in time to stop himself from rolling off the couch. His intended ten minute nap appears to have lasted longer than he planned, as the sky outside his window is getting darker, he estimates it’s about 4 pm. Thankfully, Megan had not scheduled any meetings for him this afternoon as she knew he wanted to read the reports on the new drug that one of the science floors had proposed working on. He looks at the report on the table and knows he’s in no mood to take it in after that nightmare. He reaches for his phone to call Joy, until he remembers that she has not returned his calls in months. He knows she’s alive, and moving frequently, thanks to the private investigator he hired after she disappeared, but she won’t contact him. He just wants reassurance she’s alive.

Ward paces around his office for a few minutes, feeling too much restless energy. He suddenly remembers that Danny had given Megan a large bag of M&M candies last week for her candy jar. He walks to her desks and asks if she still has it. Puzzled, she shows him the unopened bag. “Mind if I take it? I’ll bring you a new bag tomorrow,” he promises. “Um, sure Mr. Meachum,” she agrees and he walks into the office that is still set aside for Joy. He sits at her desk, looks at the picture she has on her desk of the two of them at her high school graduation. He was so proud of her, valedictorian of her class, after losing Harold and everything that they had gone through. He finds a small dish in one of her drawers and opens the M&Ms and pours them onto her desk. He sorts out all the brown M&Ms and puts the remainder in the dish and leaves it on her desk. Just in case she comes back soon. He starts eating the brown M&Ms as he walks down the hall back to his office.

 

4\. _Ward awakens, and immediately realizes he can’t get out of bed. He raises his head and sees that his legs, arms, and chest are strapped to whatever bed he has been put in, and there’s an IV in his right arm. The room is dark, but he sees an outline of someone in the corner. “Hey. Can I get a little help here?” he asks the figure. The figure begins to walk towards him and he immediately regrets asking for the help. He watches as Harold begins strolling over to him, whispering something Ward can’t hear at first, but getting louder until Ward feels as though Harold is shouting out for the world to hear. “...complete disappointment. You can’t do anything even when everything is laid out before you. I could have grabbed someone off the street and they would have been better for Rand than you. I should have chosen Joy to be take over. She’s smart. People like her. No one likes you, Ward. They wish for the days when I was alive to run Rand. They wouldn’t even notice if you died. You should just do that.”_

Immediately after waking from this latest nightmare, Ward gets out of bed and stretches, just to convince himself he’s no longer strapped to a hospital bed. He contemplates trying to sleep again, he has a couple hours before he has to be back at the office, but he’s not sure sleep will come easily now. He heads to his living room and settles down on his couch with his laptop. He goes through some end of the year financials before his meeting later that day with accounting. Once he’s done with that, he decides to try to clear out some of his inbox. He goes through a few of his emails - forwarding some reports to Danny, telling him that if he’s going to continue being part of Rand, he needs to at least skim the reports that show what the company is working on. 

When he gets to Rand later that morning, there’s a still-hot cup of coffee made just to his specifications, with a note - “Ward, stop emailing me work at 3:30 am. You should be sleeping. -Danny” Ward laughs out loud and takes a sip as he settles into his desk.

 

5\. _The knife goes into Harold easier than Ward thought it. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks that stabbing someone should require more strength. But no, the first stab he makes into Harold’s lower chest seems to require no effort at all from him. Perhaps it's the rage he’s feeling that makes the movement seem effortless. As he continues stabbing Harold, he’s not sure if he’s grunting with the effort of impaling Harold or if it’s the only way his body is capable of expressing the frustration of having his escape route to a free life ripped away from him._

_ Harold falls to the floor gasping as Ward clutches the knife that remains in his body. A moment passes and suddenly Ward is looking at Harold telling him he should get advice from the Hand on using Rand while Ward is moving the knife towards Harold for the first time again, stabbing him once, and then continuing until Harold lies silent on the floor of the penthouse. Like before, Ward again finds himself standing facing Harold, pushing the knife into him.   _

With a quiet moan, Ward wakes from this nightmare, shaken from the reminder of murdering Harold, for what he thought at the time was for good. He figures his subconscious replayed the stabbing for him over and over because he still fears Harold coming back, even though he saw the cremation. He gets out of bed, knowing there’s no chance he’ll fall back asleep, and afraid that, even if he did sleep, he’d only dream of killing Harold again, or worse, this time of Harold coming back from the dead. He sits at his desk and boots up his laptop, going to grab a cup of tea as it starts. Once he’s settled in his chair, he launches the internet browser in the hopes of finding something to occupy his mind. He tries to read some articles on Rand’s recent announcements, but can’t stop thinking of Harold. Eventually he searches for the articles that were published after Harold’s final death. He reads five different articles about how Harold committed fraud on the stockholders of Rand by faking his death for so many years, all to end up actually dying a few days later, shot and falling off the top of the Rand building. It offers little comfort to his fears of Harold returning. He considers calling Danny to get assurance Harold is not coming back, but fears what Danny may think of him calling at 3 in the morning because he had a nightmare. He ends up trying to distract himself with crossword puzzles before it’s an acceptable time to head to work.  
  


+1. _Ward can feel the heat from the door as he watches the fire through the window into the cremation room. He’s watching to make sure the body is destroyed - after Harold’s body was found on the street in front of Rand and taken to the morgue, Ward could not find a reasonable explanation to give the coroner for why Harold needed to have his head separated from his body, but he hopes cremation will also make it impossible for Harold to return to life. He watches the flames as they grow, feeling a bit more at peace than he has since he thought Harold had died from cancer all those years ago._

_ Suddenly he notices a movement in the flames. To his growing horror, he sees that it is Harold’s body beginning to move. He watches, speechless, as Harold rises and begins moving towards the door. He grabs Danny’s arm and shouts for Jeri, for someone to do something, but at their confusion, realizes only he can see Harold standing right in front of the window. Ward stands there, frozen, staring into Harold’s eyes. Harold gives him an evil smile and Ward reads his lips as he states “You disappoint me.” Harold slowly reaches out to open the door. _

Ward jerks awake, unable to control his breathing, his whole body shaking. He can feel tears in his eyes, and he stumbles out of bed to get his phone. He grabs it and without thinking about it, presses the button to call Joy. After it rings a few times, he remembers Joy has left without a word to him. He hangs up and calls the only other person he thinks may understand. 

“Hey Danny? Sorry it’s late, I was wondering if you could talk?”

  
  



End file.
